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      Samm-Art Williams, Playwright, Producer and Actor, Dies at 78

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      He challenged racial barriers in Hollywood, was a producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and earned a Tony nomination for “Home,” a paean to his Southern roots.Samm-Art Williams, who made his mark in several fields — as an executive producer of the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as an actor on both stage and screen and as a Tony-nominated playwright for “Home,” died on Monday in Burgaw, N.C. He was 78.His death was confirmed by his cousin Carol Brown. She did not cite a cause.An imposing 6-foot-8 (a lefty, he once served as a sparring partner to Muhammad Ali), Mr. Williams appeared in films including Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and the Coen brothers’ neo-noir, “Blood Simple” (1984). He had a memorable turn as Jim in the 1986 adaptation of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” part of PBS’s “American Playhouse” series.Mr. Williams as Jim with Patrick Day in the 1986 television version of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”Everett CollectionCommitted to expanding the Black presence in Hollywood, he was both a writer and an executive producer on “Fresh Prince,” the hit 1990s NBC comedy starring Will Smith as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who moves in with his aunt and uncle in the moneyed hills of Los Angeles.He also served as a writer and a producer on the television shows “Martin” and “Frank’s Place.” He was nominated for two Emmy Awards — for his work as a writer on “Motown Returns to the Apollo” in 1985 and a producer of “Frank’s Place” in 1988.Raised in Burgaw, a former railroad town north of Wilmington, N.C., he moved to New York in 1973 to pursue a career in acting. It was his wistfulness for his small Southern hometown that inspired “Home,” a production of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company that opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in Manhattan six years later before moving to Broadway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Debut at Cannes: What to Know

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      After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, we can answer your many questions, though some details still puzzle us.“Megalopolis,” the first film from the director Francis Ford Coppola in 13 years, premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival. Self-financed by Coppola, the $120 million passion project has earned headlines about a reportedly chaotic shoot, allegations of misconduct and questions about the film’s commercial prospects.But what exactly are we dealing with here? Now that I’ve seen “Megalopolis,” let me try to answer the questions you might be asking.What is “Megalopolis” about?Any attempt to sum up “Megalopolis” will impose more narrative onto this movie than it actually contains, but here goes. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, a visionary architect who dares to ask: What if a major city looked like an Iris Van Herpen dress? Like so many great men in movies, he is Haunted by Visions of a Dead Wife, but still finds himself falling for Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), mayor of the city that is sometimes called New Rome but that resembles New York.Cicero, who despises Catalina for his reckless idealism, is one of many characters trying to bring the architect to heel. Other rivals include Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), a party boy turned politician, and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a financial reporter determined to bed or plot against every powerful man in her orbit.Wait, her name is Wow Platinum?Yes, you read that correctly.What exactly is the tone of this movie?Despite the big budget, huge sets and scenes soaked in special effects, “Megalopolis” finds Coppola in the same experimental-filmmaker mode he employed for his two most recent movies, the indies “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011). Few scenes are shot or edited in a conventional manner: Coppola employs split screen, projection techniques and artsy montage at will, and the pacing of any given sequence can change on a whim.Sometimes, that anything-could-happen approach is beguiling: Midway through the Cannes press screening, a spotlight shone on a man in the front of the theater who asked questions that Driver’s Caesar would answer onscreen. At other times, though, it feels like the filmmaker is just throwing things at the wall and hoping that something will stick.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ Review: Crowded House

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      A reboot of the 2008 home invasion film “The Strangers” brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but leaves originality behind.The key to a terrific scary home invasion horror movie is not just how domesticity gets breached but why. It’s great to have a determined aggressor, sympathetic victims and a brutal invasion that’s contained and sustained. But to what end?Yet some of the best home invasion films — “Funny Games,” “Them” — don’t supply easy answers. “The Strangers,” Bryan Bertino’s terrifying 2008 thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple under siege, didn’t either. It kept the invaders’ motives and their identities mysterious, amping up the devil-you-don’t-know terrors with a sense of randomness that was despairing. The premise and execution were simple. The payoff was a gut punch.On its face, “The Strangers: Chapter 1,” the first of three new films in a “Strangers” reboot from the director Renny Harlin (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master”), checks all the same boxes. But the hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.This new tale begins with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her boyfriend, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), taking a fifth anniversary road trip through the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in a rural Oregon town, they meet a seen-it-before who’s who of horror movie yokeldom: unsmiling boys, sweaty bumpkin mechanics, a diner waitress whose eyes scream “run, if you know what’s good.”As Maya and Ryan wait for their car to be fixed, they decide to spend the night at a secluded rental cabin. Under darkness there’s a knock at the door and, true to the home invasion formula, our leading sweethearts get terrorized until dawn inside the cabin and through the woods by a trio of assailants with big weapons and indefinite end goals. They have face coverings too, making menace out of the same blank-faced creepiness the villains embodied in the original film and its 2018 sequel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Film Geek’ Review: A Cinephile’s Guide to New York

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      The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.Richard Shepard, the director of the black comedies “Dom Hemingway” and “The Matador,” is a lifelong cinephile with a voracious appetite for movies.“Film Geek,” a feature-length video essay composed primarily of footage of films that Shepard saw growing up in the 1970s in New York City, delves deep into his obsession. In a voice-over, he recounts his childhood, when he was “addicted to movies, to watching them, to making them.” He is enthusiastic, and the movie aspires to make that enthusiasm infectious.I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying. For minutes at a time, he simply rattles off the titles of various movies that he saw as a child. I appreciate that seeing “Rocky” made a strong impression on him. I did not need to know that he lost his virginity in the apartment building where John G. Avildsen, the director of “Rocky,” once lived.“Film Geek” has been compared to Thom Andersen’s great documentary from 2003, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” and on the level of montage, they share a superficial resemblance: “Film Geek,” like Andersen’s essay film, is brisk and well edited.But “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is also a thoughtful and incisive work of film criticism, whereas Shepard describes movies in clichés, when he describes movies at all. More often he is talking about himself, a subject of interest to far fewer viewers.Film GeekNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Hong Sang-soo’s Film ‘In Our Day” Meditates on the Spice of Life

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      The Korean director Hong Sang-soo winds together the slenderest strands of two intersecting stories to make a tender film about simple pleasures.In another world there’s a Hong Sang-soo Cinematic Universe, where a rabid fandom celebrates the one or two movies every year featuring a revolving door not of familiar superheroes but of poets, filmmakers and actors, each of them contending with questions of life and love rather than planetary threats. Those elements, of artists in quotidian scenarios, drinking soju and smoking amid everyday conversation, are present in many of the small humanist gems that make up this South Korean auteur’s filmography, and the same goes for his latest, “In Our Day.”The film, as warm and wise as it is simple and languid, follows two separate parties (diptychs are another Hong trademark) across a single afternoon. One involves Sangwon (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s frequent collaborator and offscreen partner), an actress pondering retirement, as she spends the day with her friend and her younger cousin; the other involves Uiju (Ki Joo-bong), an old poet dispensing life lessons in his apartment to two university students, one of whom is filming him for a documentary.The two story lines don’t cross paths, as they often do in Hong’s films; they are united only by the deployment of a culinary hack: mixing hot pepper paste into ramyun. His gochujang-inflected noodles provide a simple pleasure made all the more satisfying in recent days for Uiju, who, on doctor’s orders, is abstaining from drinking and smoking. But he can’t quite resist on either front, reflecting a sentiment from early in the film when Sangwon, offering up treats to a friend’s cat, says, “What’s the point of living, anyway? Eat your fill.”It’s a glimmer of existential wisdom buried in the mundane, if you look at it the right way. Most of the film is made up of these moments. Isn’t life like that, too? To search for or expect more would be to court disappointment. “Don’t look for meaning. That’s cowardice,” Uiju tells a young pupil searching desperately for grand answers. “Just jump in the water. Don’t try knowing it all before jumping, like a coward.”In Our DayNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘IF’ Review: Invisible Friends, but Real Celebrity Cameos

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      The film is a slim story about a girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who helps a crank named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) play matchmaker. Oh, and Bradley Cooper is a glass of ice water.The big “IF” — as in “imaginary friend” — in John Krasinski’s treacly kids dramedy is a grizzly-sized purple goon who goes by the name Blue. The boy who conjured him was colorblind, he explains. Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is one of dozens of dreamed-up creatures in Brooklyn who long for their now-grown BFFs to remember they exist.At the Memory Lane Retirement Community underneath Coney Island, there’s also a pink alligator (Maya Rudolph), a superhero dog (Sam Rockwell), a worn teddy (Louis Gossett Jr.), a retro cartoon butterfly (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a robot (Jon Stewart), an astronaut (George Clooney), a glass of ice water (Bradley Cooper), a gummy bear (Amy Schumer), a unicorn (Emily Blunt), a flower (Matt Damon), a cat in an octopus costume (Blake Lively), a ghost (Matthew Rhys), a soap bubble (Awkwafina), some green slime (Keegan-Michael Key), and an invisible blob who the credits claim is none other than Brad Pitt.What’s more impressive: Krasinski’s imagination or the very real friends in his Rolodex?Most of these characters merely stroll through the frame to say hello, or whine to each other in group therapy. Yet these celebrity cameos take up about as much space as the plot, a gentle, slim story about an unflappable 12-year-old girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who helps a crank named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) play matchmaker for the lonely IFs.If — and this is a rhetorical if — you’re still traumatized by the last shot of Bing Bong, the forgotten imaginary friend in Pixar’s “Inside Out,” breathe easy. There’s no existential threat (or narrative tension) about what might happen if the goofy gang remains consigned to oblivion. Palling about with kids again just sounds nice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Coma’ Review: A Labyrinthine Lockdown Movie

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      Bertrand Bonello’s latest horror film, dedicated to his teenage daughter, pushes the boundaries of the conventional pandemic movie.“Coma,” a pandemic-themed horror movie by the director Bertrand Bonello, takes its title from one of its two cloistered characters living in France during the coronavirus lockdown. Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) is a social media influencer whose channel is made up of surreal how-to videos, philosophical monologues and weather reports (though it doesn’t matter, “you can’t go out, anyway,” she explains).Watching Patricia is an unnamed teenage girl (Louise Labèque), moody and introspective as she spends her days in confinement glued to the screen.Don’t be misled by the more conventional pandemic scenes, like the teenager’s video chats with friends — “Coma” pushes the boundaries of the so-called lockdown movie with its thrilling, chaotic form.At first, it seemingly tracks the teenager’s online interactions: Patricia’s uncanny missives and a smutty sitcom played out by stop-motion dolls. We also see the teenager’s recurring nightmare, in which she’s trapped in a purgatorial forest, as well as surveillance footage in which she appears to be out in the streets.With Bonello’s fluid editing, the gradual spillover between scenes and intrusions by reality itself — then-President Trump’s tweets play a role — seems to flatten time. That’s certainly become a cliché in films like “Locked Down” or Bo Burnham’s “Inside,” but Bonello’s experimental approach brings a new level of desperation to this compressed version of reality.As a relatively short, minimalistic production, “Coma” plays like an amuse-bouche to Bonello’s recent epic “The Beast,” about the tragedy of characters who lack free will. Patricia is a kind of evangelist for this worldview. She sells an electronic memory game, like Simon, that the teenager plays to kill time, but, as if by some kind of dark magic, cannot seem to lose.The film begins and ends with a subtitled message written by Bonello to his daughter, to whom he dedicated the film. It acknowledges the unique despair of her generation — of children accustomed to climate change and school shootings; their best years spent online, trapped at home during a global pandemic.This message is also what makes “Coma” surpass the trappings of a lockdown movie: It may be anchored to that period, but it speaks to an existential crisis that defines many right now.ComaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How ‘Back to Black’ Recreated Amy Winehouse’s Look

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      In the biopic “Back to Black,” Marisa Abela wears some of the singer’s actual clothes, but the hair and makeup team chose to tone the signature beehive down.Few looks are as distinctive as Amy Winehouse’s was. The singer’s sweeping eyeliner, tottering heels and disheveled beehive are still instantly recognizable, 13 years after her death.In the new biopic “Back to Black,” Marisa Abela plays the star from the beginning of her music career until her final days. She wears mini skirts with girlish ruffles and small kitten heels to begin with, before adopting her distinctive pinup aesthetic as she dives deeper into the music industry and her self-destructive habits.Peta Dunstall, left, the makeup and hair designer for “Back to Black,” working on Abela’s hair on set. Dean Rogers/Focus FeaturesThe film takes its title from Winehouse’s second album, and “when we get to ‘Back to Black’ Amy, it’s more sexy,” the film’s costume designer, PC Williams, said. “There was a big change in the way she presented.”To recreate this, the production team studied many real-life images of Winehouse. But there were also some intentional changes: They were making “a piece of cinema as opposed to creating a documentary,” Williams said. Here is a closer look at the process.Towering HairAbela as Amy Winehouse in “Back to Black.”Dean Rogers/Focus FeaturesThe real Amy Winehouse performing at the Riverside Studios in London 2008.Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for NARASWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More